Maltese vs 'muddling' foreigners

On Monday morning, we woke up to the announcement that Renzo Piano would be unveiling his plans for the opera house site and Freedom Square later on in the week. Even before the plans had been made public, the popular jury rushed to their keyboards to give their verdict online.

A few expressed their reservations about the roofless theatre (which has already earned the moniker of the "cabrio theatre"), others made weak puns about the architect's surname and some expressed cautious optimism. As I ploughed through the comments, I noted that many of them were sceptical about the project, not because of its merits or otherwise, but because of the nationality of its creator.

That's right. Objections were being raised, not because we had had a good look at the plans and dismissed them (they hadn't been made public yet), but because a foreigner had the gall to make those plans. Instead of having one of our own homegrown architects with pure Maltese blood coursing through his veins, the Prime Minister had gone and brought over some interloper from the land where they slurp spaghetti and worship Silvio Berlusconi.

Have a look at some of the comments posted to get an idea of the degree of chauvinism expressed. Someone was peeved off at the fact that Piano (and not the Maltese people) had persuaded the government not to construct a new Parliament building on the old opera house site. "This goes to show that we still have that colonial mentality where we put more weight on what foreigners say" he wrote.

His feelings were shared by the aggrieved gentlemen who insisted that it was the "MALTESE" who should decide on the matter by means of a referendum. This propensity to write in capital letters seems to be shared by the irate reader who is convinced that "this project should have been given to a collective of talented MALTESE ARCHITECTS and not to someone who does not live here and knows the country well enough. We got an OUTSIDER and paid him a lot of money when this could have been done locally and the funds paid to local architects."

I don't know about you, but it all started to sound obsessively clannish, that only we (MALTESE) had a clue about how to go rehabilitating this city of ours. Many people seem to think that nationality and residence are an adequate substitute for qualifications, experience and expertise in a given profession.

According to this line of thinking, the fact that we live here and trudge across Freedom Square on a daily, or more frequent basis makes us more qualified to sketch out the plans.

Naturally this would make the owner of Giraldu's Kiosk in the opera house ruins - the person most suitably qualified to draw up the plans. This seems to have escaped the notice of the person who mused that "for 60 years, the Maltese have been waiting to rebuild the old theatre site. Now comes an Italian who proposes to keep it as it is; ruins at the entrance of Valletta." This contempt for the "Italian" is echoed by the person who declared that Lawrence Gonzi had dishonoured the country by ignoring Maltese architects in order to suck up to a foreign architect.

I was appalled at the sentiments expressed, the hostility shown towards a wonderfully-gifted architect, because he is not Maltese. You do not have to be a forelock-tugging native with an inferiority complex to appreciate Piano's works. Yes - he is the creator of the controversial Pompidou Centre, but he also designed the sinuous Zentrum Paul Klee museum, the Parco della Muscia auditorium in Italy, and the Shard which will soon change the London skyline.

Acknowledging this does not mean that we do not believe in local talent or that Maltese architects are in any way inferior to their foreign counterparts. However we cannot continue labouring under the illusion that only talent worth considering is of the local variety and that the recognition of foreign genius is unpatriotic. We should also move away from the idea that Malta is the centre of the universe, populated exclusively by superior beings who know everything about all topics under the sun.

• This distrust of foreigners manifested itself in another way this week, when Greenpeace activists protesting against unsustainable fishing, tried to board a fishing boat in the Grand Harbour. At one point, one of the activists - a woman - tried to clamber aboard the fishing vessel.

The boat was manned by a number of burly men who could easily have warded off the sole trespasser by using water jets. Instead of doing so, they preferred to rain down blows on her face, while one of them urged them on and yelling out expletives which were broadcast on the international media.

Instead of condemning this disgusting and needless show of violence, most people took umbrage at the Greenpeace protesters for picking on Malta for disproportional vilification. Why were they picking on us and bullying us, a reader asked? "We are MALTESE and we do not like muddling FOREIGNERS" someone added.

Again, these reactions show how paranoid we are. Greenpeace is an environmental organisation, which carries out campaigns for the conservation of fishing stock all over the world - not just in Malta.

• Though technically she may have been trespassing, that's a minor offence - not an affront to national dignity. If we had our eye on the big picture, we'd realise that all the Greenpeace protesters were doing was trying to draw attention to the dire plight of tuna in the Mediterranean.

Instead of delighting in the spectacle of a couple of heavies laying into a defenceless woman, we could start thinking about what we'll do when tuna stocks are depleted in our seas. Judging by our readiness to find a foreign scapegoat for all our woes, we'll probably blame it on Italian architects and start bashing them up instead.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt